In digital networking and communication systems, it is desirable to be able to receive information from a variety of different sources. In doing so, it is possible increase the quantity and quality of data that is available to users. However, various challenges exist when attempting to aggregate data from different sources. One such challenge is that the data labelling used in one data set in comparison to another data set may be vastly different, despite being associated with the same or similar category of data. In this situation, it may be difficult or impossible for the data processing system to identify similarities between the data sets in order to aggregate the data in an accurate manner. In addition, a given data set may be unfamiliar to the data processing system, even though it does in fact have data categories and types of data which correspond to one or more other data sets which would be processed by the data processing system. When data labels are incorrectly interpreted, inaccurate comparisons and conclusions may be drawn from the data sets.
Granted European patent 1 426 877 describes a system for selectively importing and exporting hierarchically structured data. In this system, it is assumed that elements in the data have common labels such as “service”, “subscription” and “currency”. These labels can be specified by the user so that the relevant data can be extracted. Since this system relies on a common labelling scheme, it is not possible for the user to automatically extract the same type of data from two different data sets for comparison, where different labels are used in the data sets.
It is desirable to provide a system that allows data to be aggregated and/or compared from a variety of different sources, in situations where the labelling structure in the input data may be inconsistent, such that meaningful comparisons can be made between different data sets.